Organizing github repos

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

— Phil Carlton

I find that I spend an awful lot of time naming things. More than that, it’s a distraction. I also spend a lot of time organizing directories, and a lot of time trying to recall where I’ve put things.

GitHub has made it a lot easier for me to find code online. In fact, it’s so easy that sometimes I just download another copy of a repository rather than search my home directory for one.

As of yesterday, though, the madness is over, because I decided to replicate github’s organization on my own computer. Here are the first two levels of my new, and currently modest, ~/github directory:

As I get more repos downloaded, I think my new organization style will only make more sense. And if I also need a github repo somewhere else, I can symlink it. Also, ~/src is symlinked to ~/github/benatkin.

The idea came when I realized I didn’t have all of my GitHub repos in one place. As you can tell by the tree, I still don’t. Also, I’m putting stuff in my GitHub directory that I may add to GitHub later. If something stays there longer than a week and I don’t put it on GitHub, though, I’ll move it to the archive.

This new directory structure also has the nice side effect that I won’t need to delete repositories just because I need stuff to be easier to find. It shouldn’t take long for the number at the end of the tree output to go over 100, and in a while, the number could be in the thousands. I’ll think of it as a partial mirror.